#LEWINNING: Meet 12 Startups You'll Need To Reckon With

Le Camping is an accelerator program for Paris startups modeled after Y Combinator. The first crop started three months ago and Le Camping held its first Investor Day yesterday to present the startups to the public. We weren't invited but managed to crash anyway.

In these pages, your writer puts on a happy face and boosts French startups. And while it's legitimately true that the French startup market is getting hotter and hotter, there are too many stories like this one and this one that could drive one to despair.

So, having not followed Le Camping enough, we were half-expecting a poor crop of too-French startups: long-winded pitches, too much emphasis on making money and too little on product and vision, stunted ambitions, products for the French market only...

Instead what we had was the opposite: a crop of amazing startups that wouldn't look out of place one bit in Y Combinator's best crop or in any top VC's portfolio. And they know it too. Before the event got underway, we asked a couple of investors whether the startups had raised money, and heard back: "They don't need to, they have revenues", and "two or three turned down money because they're getting so much traction they can raise later at a higher valuation." This for companies started three months ago in a city where you'd normally hear "They're trying but can't drum up enough interest."

A few of us decided to pick #LeWinning as the hashtag for the event and off we were...